Count & Countess Dracula (Ghostbusters 1975)

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"How dare those stuck-up snobs Christopher Lee and Al Lewis have us blackballed!"

Count Dracula and Countess Dracula are antagonists in the 1975 Filmation Live Action Saturday Morning kids' series, The Ghost Busters. These were the ghosts of the famous literary vampire and his wife, also a vampire, returned from beyond to seek a blood source that could rejuvenate the aging, increasingly addled Count. Being a Saturday kids' show, both their ruthlessness and their methods of seeking this are massively toned down; being a slapstick-driven show, their competence is driven down even further. Count Dracula is depicted as having a vaguely Bela Lugosi-esque accent; Countess Dracula speaks like a typical TV American housewife, and a bit of stereotypical sitcom nag to boot. They are featured in the show's tenth episode, 'The Vampire's Apprentice'.

Emerging in the cemetery, the vampire ghosts bemoan the fallen status of the Count (whose fangs are actually dentures now), plotting to take over the adjacent castle as their base and daytime sleeping place, with apparently even dead undead fearing sunlight. While the Count stumbled about and the Countess snarked his lacks, The Ghost Busters are in their office, with, among other antics, Eddie Spencer making an effort to teach Tracy The Gorilla how to speak, the results of which have an exasperated Jake Kong send the two to fetch their later assignment from unseen leader Zero. After another near-miss car ride from Tracy, and a model plane used as an exploding playback device, the two learn of the vampire ghosts and go to tell Jake. After a concentrated burst of groaner puns (including a game of Go Fish concluded with an actual fish), the heroic goofballs make for the cemetery to find the vampire ghosts. Implied but never stated is that allowing the Count to reach his former glory might entail peril for the living.

That glory seems exceedingly far off for the Countess, beleaguered by the Count needing a coffin-time story and having his fangs 'capped' so well he ends up looking like a walrus—and then promptly loses these as well. Approaching the castle, the Ghost Busters flatter Eddie into posing as a diplomat mistaking the ghosts for the Count and Countess of Luexmbourg. Unsurprisingly, the hungry vampires take Eddie inside, eventually worrying his partners. Eddie tries to run for it, but is cornered and bitten. When Tracy and Jake find him, they catch on too late that he is now a vampire. Somehow despite this, the usually level-headed Jake throws Eddie the Ghost De-Materializer, which he ditches. As ever and always, the villains' incompetence exceeds that of the heroes, and when the Countess falls for the corny gag of a 'Wooden Steak' ( a prop sirloin made of wood and painted to look like a cartoon T-Bone ), she gets a painful splinter that Eddie bites to relieve. The show's lore earlier asserted that a second bite from a vampire will cure a turned victim, and biting the one who turned him changes Eddie back to Human. With him freed, the trio corner and banish first the Countess, who hisses as she is De-Materialized, and then the Count, who puns as he is sent off. In the epilogue, Jake and Tracy get a scare when the hapless Eddie demonstrates a set of prop fang-teeth, making them believe he has reverted once again. His prop teeth of course look just like the Count's dentures, which somehow kept on when he was subjected to the Ghost De-Materializer.

Trivia

As with any other vampire fiction, the rules governing the Count & Countess are entirely made up by the writers, using various sources and whole cloth. They are vulnerable to wooden stakes (represented by a literal wooden prop of a T-Bone Steak) and silver, although bullets are cited here, usually reserved for a werewolf. The two avoid sunlight, almost a given in vampire fiction, and some sources do state that a vampire absent blood will begin to age until sated on blood, at which point they will revert to the age they were when they died—stopped being Human.

Eddie is turned into a vampire via a bite, but it is a bite he inflicts on the vampire who turned him that changes him back. This makes some lore-based sense, but not plot-wise, when the point of their return was to give blood to her decrepit husband.

The Countess derides the Count by comparing him to two former vampire boyfriends, one of whom is named Vladimir. The literary character of Count Dracula is based on an Eastern European Prince named Vladimir III Tepesch Dracula, widely known as Vlad The Impaler. Therefore, Count Dracula here in not named Vlad.

The somewhat gravelly-voiced Countess was played by Dena Dietrich, an actress who has seen a wide array of roles, including as the sister of the even rougher-voiced Dorothy on The Golden Girls. Her greatest claim to fame came from series of commercials, well known in the 1970's, as a sometimes-vengeful Mother Nature, angered when Chiffon Margarine turned out to not be butter. (Source : Wikipedia)